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A review by turrean
The Glass Sentence by S.E. Grove
2.0
A generation or two before the birth of the book's heroine, the world suffered a terrible catastrophe: time itself came unhinged. Now the continents and countries of our familiar world have changed. The maps at the beginning of the book show that in Boston, it's the 19th century; in Japan, it's the 40th. A cool concept.
However--the book is uneven. It is so intricately plotted, and its world is beautifully crafted. However, the pacing suffers from a surfeit of information. An example is the description of a plant that displays unnaturally fast growth: this takes nearly an entire page. Everyone has a backstory, and everyone wants to tell his or her tale to the point-of-view main character, Sophia. It takes a very long time to get things rolling.
Having made this criticism, it will now seem very inconsistent of me to complain of a lack of detail. But the heart of the tale lies in the making of maps, marvelous maps that incorporate people's memories and convey a fantastic wealth of detail and sensation at the merest touch. But while Grove is happy to give you a long description of a banquet of candy or the life story of a pair of pirate siblings, or two pages of nauseating description of the torture of one of the villain's henchmen, there is little description of how the marvelous maps are created. We are told the process can be perverted; an incidental character near the beginning of the story is sucked dry when his memories are stolen, and the poor henchman is left nearly as badly off. If this is how the baddies do it, how do the good guys do it? Our main good cartographer says people share memories with him. Is it magic? Science? Future technology from somewhere else in the Disrupted world? I didn't get why Boston of the 1880s now had a twenty-hour day, while a city in what in our world would be Mexico has a nine-hour day. How does that work when they're all on the same planet? I also didn't understand how the life watches of the New Occident citizens worked, or the significance of Sophia's ability (or disability?) to become lost in time. The resulting scenes were so confusing.
I imagine the book will be relished by those who like vividly imagined worlds. I, however, made it to around page 330, and found myself too put off by the torture scenes. I skimmed the rest.
However--the book is uneven. It is so intricately plotted, and its world is beautifully crafted. However, the pacing suffers from a surfeit of information. An example is the description of a plant that displays unnaturally fast growth: this takes nearly an entire page. Everyone has a backstory, and everyone wants to tell his or her tale to the point-of-view main character, Sophia. It takes a very long time to get things rolling.
Having made this criticism, it will now seem very inconsistent of me to complain of a lack of detail. But the heart of the tale lies in the making of maps, marvelous maps that incorporate people's memories and convey a fantastic wealth of detail and sensation at the merest touch. But while Grove is happy to give you a long description of a banquet of candy or the life story of a pair of pirate siblings, or two pages of nauseating description of the torture of one of the villain's henchmen, there is little description of how the marvelous maps are created. We are told the process can be perverted; an incidental character near the beginning of the story is sucked dry when his memories are stolen, and the poor henchman is left nearly as badly off. If this is how the baddies do it, how do the good guys do it? Our main good cartographer says people share memories with him. Is it magic? Science? Future technology from somewhere else in the Disrupted world? I didn't get why Boston of the 1880s now had a twenty-hour day, while a city in what in our world would be Mexico has a nine-hour day. How does that work when they're all on the same planet? I also didn't understand how the life watches of the New Occident citizens worked, or the significance of Sophia's ability (or disability?) to become lost in time. The resulting scenes were so confusing.
I imagine the book will be relished by those who like vividly imagined worlds. I, however, made it to around page 330, and found myself too put off by the torture scenes. I skimmed the rest.